Jaunty Tests the Ephemeral Notification Waters With Notify-OSD

by Kristin Shoemaker - Feb. 23, 2009Comments (1)

One of the goals put forth for Ubuntu's Jaunty Jackalope at the last Developer Summit, the development of a unified, "hands-off" notification display, has finally made an appearance in the testing release, according to Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth.

The new notification display is designed to behave similarly regardless of desktop environment, and deliver notifications in an non-intrusive manner. An overview of what Shuttleworth calls "attention-management guidelines" is outlined on the Ubuntu wiki, describing how to design notifications that get the user's attention, inform, and then effortlessly get out of the way.

The development team working in this area is aware of at least 35 applications that need extra attention to work well with the new system, and its current focus is to address these issues and identify other applications with similar quirks.

The specifics on how to implement the new notification display agent, Notify-OSD, are also detailed on the Ubuntu wiki. It's worth a look for any non-developers who are simply curious as to what the notifications will look like, how they will behave by default, and how they can be configured to behave.

Also listed on the wiki are programs that are expected to fully work with the new notification system by the time Jaunty is released in April. Shuttleworth says that these are some core applications that require a persistent response framework, and that by Karmic's release in October, additional persistent tools will be available for other applications.